Suburban Diversity in Postwar America

Recent media coverage and scholarly analysis have emphasized the diversification of contemporary American suburbs—by race, ethnicity, class, family structure, political behavior, built environment, and much more. The 2008 U.S. Census update revealed that racial and ethnic minorities now make up one-third of the total suburban population in the nation’s one hundred largest metropolitan regions, a total that included a majority of each of the three largest minority groups. While 78 percent of non-Hispanic whites live in the suburbs of these metropolitan areas, so do 62 percent of Asian Americans, 59 percent of Hispanics, and 51 percent of African Americans (up from 22 percent in 1980). ¹ The minority suburban experience is extraordinarily diverse, with residential patterns that include affluent single-family neighborhoods, high-poverty inner-ring suburbs, various types of new immigrant gateways, majority-minority counties and metropolitan regions and exurban developments hit hard by predatory subprime lending and the ongoing home foreclosure crisis. ² The U.S. suburban population now includes a majority of both first-generation immigrants and poor residents of metropolitan areas, and nearly half of all renters. ³ Despite the cultural persistence of the traditional nuclear family ideal, only about one-fourth of today’s suburban households consist of heterosexual married couples with children under the age of eighteen. ⁴ In partisan terms, the suburban electorate has split almost evenly in presidential elections since 1992, with Republican strength concentrated in perimeter suburbs and exurbs and a growing Democratic base in higher-density, inner-ring, and multiethnic suburbs. ⁵ As scholars debate the consequences of the “urbanization of the suburbs” and seek new models to supplant the urban–suburban binary, it seems difficult if not impossible to continue to generalize about typical suburban family life, neighborhood demographics, land-use patterns, or political culture. ⁶

Discussions of present-day suburban diversity often invoke the traditional white middle-class residential norm as the counterpoint to recent metropolitan transformations, which presumes a preceding era of suburban homogeneity that historians and other scholars have often called into question. In March 2001, the Journal of Urban History helped propel the theme of suburban diversity into mainstream historiographical debate by sponsoring a special issue on the changing relationships among North American cities and suburbs between 1900 and 1950. In the introductory essay, Richard Harris contended that the ideal of white upper-middle-class domesticity “has never described more than a portion of the suburban experience,” which also encompassed industrial towns, working-class households, and racial/ethnic minority enclaves. ⁷ In their article proposing a new synthesis, Harris and Robert Lewis called on scholars to abandon the urban–suburban dichotomy, marshaled data showing that pre–World War II suburbs were “as socially diverse as the cities that they surrounded,” and concluded that “differences between the cities and the suburbs as a whole were quite minor and were dwarfed by variations within the city and among the suburbs.” ⁸ In her contribution, Mary Corbin Sies charged advocates of suburban diversity with overstating their case by contrasting social practices in working-class areas with clichés about upper-middle-class culture, when case studies of affluent suburbs revealed considerable heterogeneity within their borders as well. At the same time, Sies argued that upper-middle-class suburbanites participated in the cultural and ideological production of a “suburban ideal” that disguised the internal diversity of their own communities while simultaneously shaping land-use policies and class aspirations in non-elite suburbs as well. ⁹ In his rejoinder, Andrew Wiese emphasized the “discrete visions of suburban living” in working-class, ethnic, and African-American communities but conceded that “by the 1950s, . . . such distinctions become increasingly difficult to draw.” ¹⁰

What about suburban diversity during the postwar decades, the quarter century from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, the era of the great migration of white working-class and middle-class families to the sprawling, racially segregated, and federally subsidized suburban fringe? The scholarship on race and politics in postwar metropolitan history has operated largely through familiar yet still powerful suburban–urban binaries—white flight and urban crisis; white backlash and black power; homogeneous/prosperous/increasingly conservative suburbs versus diverse/deindustrializing/despairingly liberal cities; the Kerner Commission’s “two societies” diagnosis of white suburban affluence surrounding and containing urban black poverty. ¹¹ While these tropes highlight important trends of residential segregation, political realignment, and metropolitan inequality, they remain difficult to square with the widespread consensus that considerable suburban diversity has marked both the contemporary and the pre–World War II periods—unless the postwar era represented a long aberration. Is it possible to reconcile what is arguably the most significant metropolitan feature of the postwar decades—the dual housing market that systematically enforced racial segregation in new residential neighborhoods—with Harris and Lewis’s argument that the decentralization of employment and the fragmentation of metropolitan governance during the prewar period “allowed all sorts of people to settle at the fringe . . . [and] blurred rather than sharpened the distinction between city and suburb”? ¹² We believe that it is, but only if scholars move beyond the deeply racialized (indeed, biracialized) urban–suburban binary and recognize that a conceptual model of suburban heterogeneity on a metropolitan scale is compatible with mapping the persistent patterns of racial and class segregation at the neighborhood level that have marked urban and suburban areas alike.

The contributors to this special section initially presented their work at an interdisciplinary 2009 conference on “The Diverse Suburb,” and they represent the vibrancy of suburban and metropolitan studies within their individual fields of urban studies, history, sociology, and American Studies/ethnic studies. ¹³ The four essays in this forum build on the insights of the 2001 JUH issue on pre-1950 suburbs, and provide a bridge to the scholarship on contemporary metropolitan trends, by exploring themes of suburban diversity and reconsidering the relationship between cities and suburbs during and after the post–World War II decades. On a conceptual level, this perspective extends but also qualifies Harris and Lewis’s key insight that “although individually homogeneous, [pre-1950] suburbs in the aggregate were socially diverse, as were most central cities.” ¹⁴ In methodological terms, these authors reinforce Sies’s call for “approaches that encompass social, material, and cultural processes” in order to illuminate how residents of suburban communities “experienced life on the ground.” ¹⁵ Each of the contributors adopts the case study method to explore the symbolic, material, and sociocultural dynamics of community formation: Michan Connor’s analysis of the varied local effects and lasting ideological consequences of the “Lakewood Plan” of suburban incorporation in metropolitan Los Angeles; Sarah Potter’s examination of the diverse meanings attached to residential space by black and white families in postwar Chicago and its suburbs; Farrah Gafford’s multigenerational account of African American residential life in a planned single-family development in New Orleans; and Wendy Cheng’s investigation of comparative racial formation among Asian Americans and Latinos in the majority-minority suburbs of the West San Gabriel Valley in Southern California.

These and other studies of local community formation provide opportunities to complicate the categories of “urban” and “suburban,” and to move the postwar literature beyond the traditional biracial model, without losing sight of the macro-level structural forces and public policies that shaped the metropolitan landscape. Given the tendency to associate the concept of suburban diversity with recent revisionist scholarship, it is important to recall that the sociologists who conducted the first round of community formation studies in new post–World War II suburbs overwhelmingly critiqued the myth of white middle-class homogeneity and directly challenged the conventional wisdom of urban–suburban divergence. ¹⁶ After living for two years in Levittown, New Jersey, Herbert Gans characterized the mass-produced development as a “heterogeneous community” with a lower-middle-class majority and disputed the prevailing view that “life in these new suburbs was radically different from that in the older cities and towns.” He emphasized Levittown’s socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic diversity and recounted significant internal conflict along class and generational lines. Levittown might seem homogeneous compared to a large city, Gans observed, but the planned suburb had a greater degree of Protestant/Catholic/Jewish interaction than most individual urban neighborhoods, and quite similar levels of class and racial segregation. ¹⁷ In Class in Suburbia (1963), a study of the Long Island Levittown, William Dobriner attacked proponents of the suburban myth for using “highly selective, generally upper-middle-class tract suburbs as the empirical basis of their generalizations.” He portrayed suburbs collectively as “increasingly like the city, . . . increasingly heterogeneous in economic function and in class, ethnic, and racial characteristics.” ¹⁸ Bennett Berger likewise argued that mass suburbanization had not produced “so unique and distinctive a way of life” in postwar America and found “sharp differences” between blue-collar and white-collar suburbs, alongside “striking similarities between life in urban residential neighborhoods and tract suburbs of similar social cast.” ¹⁹

The sociological literature of the 1950s and 1960s often noted the overwhelmingly or all-white makeup of postwar suburban developments but primarily investigated socioeconomic class and the related debates over status, conformity, and whether suburban migration altered cultural norms. ²⁰ By contrast, the dominant trend in the historical scholarship on postwar suburbanization has downplayed the theme of class diversity and highlighted metropolitan patterns of racial inequality by focusing on the political economy of residential segregation and the political culture of white middle-class neighborhoods. Kenneth Jackson’s still influential synthesis, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1984), acknowledged the “extraordinary diversity” of suburbs that “come in every type, shape, and size: rich and poor, industrial and residential, new and old.” But Jackson’s operative definition of American suburbia, which he did concede was “arbitrary and imprecise,” revolved around low-density bedroom communities of single-family homes populated by (implicitly white) middle-class and upper-middle-class families—a formula shared by other major surveys of suburban history as well. ²¹ In perhaps its most significant contribution, Crabgrass Frontier illuminated the federal policies that subsidized affluent suburban developments and enforced racial segregation in the metropolitan housing market on a national scale. ²² Subsequent work by Thomas Sugrue, Lizabeth Cohen, David Freund, and many others has investigated the convergence of government policies, municipal politics, and grassroots actors in promoting residential segregation in urban and suburban America—perhaps best captured by Freund’s argument that “the politics of [racial] exclusion helped unify a suburban population that was remarkably diverse” in terms of class, ethnicity, and partisan affiliation. ²³ Following in this vein, dozens of local case studies have centered on themes of “white flight” from American cities, “white backlash” against the civil rights movement, and the ascendancy of political conservatism in the middle-class suburbs. ²⁴

Although these explorations of race and politics in the postwar suburbs take the form of community studies, they are not studies of community formation in the comprehensive sense favored by Herbert Gans or Mary Corbin Sies, but rather attempts to excavate the suburban origins of pressing national developments such as the roots of the urban crisis, the fate of the civil rights movement, and the rise of the New Right. It is notable, then, that more traditional community studies of racial and class formation have animated the growing consensus among “new suburban historians” for a return to the conceptual model of suburban diversity. In My Blue Heaven (2002), which addressed the intersection of whiteness, class, and politics through the methods of social history, Becky Nicolaides critiqued scholarly inattention to working-class suburban communities based on a circular definition that “a suburb is a suburb only when it is inhabited by privileged whites.” Yet her chronology also reinforced the prevailing view of prewar suburban heterogeneity followed by postwar standardization as white homeowners in South Gate and other working-class L.A. suburbs adopted a “middle-class suburban ideal” in land-use policies, responded to the civil rights movement by shifting toward Republican conservatism, and ultimately abandoned their neighborhoods to low-income and predominantly Latino residents. ²⁵ In Places of Their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (2004), Andrew Wiese also challenged the popular and scholarly equations of suburbia with affluent whiteness and leveled the now famous critique that “historians have done a better job of excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites.” Wiese emphasized the shifting spatial contexts of African American identity and community formation in the face of persistent forces of metropolitan inequality, from the divergent values and practices of working-class black suburbanites before World War II, to a complex fusion of distinctive racial consciousness and shared middle-class suburban ideals in the postwar decades. ²⁶

The model of suburban diversity promoted by Nicolaides and Wiese has helped to refocus scholarly attention on working-class and minority suburbanites, but their books leave open the question of whether and to what extent the postwar decades remain a long aberration—as does the periodization of their important anthology The Suburb Reader (2006). ²⁷ While a more heterogeneous cast of characters populate these narratives, the turning points continue to revolve around midcentury transformations in American political economy and political culture that established a “hegemonic” suburban ideal, an “emerging city–suburb divide,” and metropolitan structures of racial inequality that endured despite the “striking diversification of the suburban population” since the 1970s. ²⁸ A similar chronology can be found in the survey that is most attuned to the topic of suburban diversity, Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen’s Picture Windows (2000), which recounts the standard Levittown-centered interpretation during the postwar decades followed by more contemporary chapters on African American suburbanites, female-headed households, Asian and Latin American immigrants, and new multiethnic communities. ²⁹ The 2006 anthology New Suburban History also reflects the challenge of incorporating a model of diversity into the reigning postwar synthesis that revolves around political economy, metropolitan fragmentation, residential segregation, and white homeowner politics. In their introduction, Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue reiterate the revisionist critique that early suburban historians focused too narrowly on the “affluent and white bedroom communities of the suburban cliché,” although most of the contributors primarily examine the political, economic, and racial consequences of white middle-class and corporate suburbanization. The volume’s endorsement of a metropolitan framework that encompasses “central cities, competing suburbs, and their regions,” however, does hold the potential to reconcile its parallel themes of “spatialized inequality” and the “diversity of suburbanization.” ³⁰

Recent scholarship in multiple subfields of history and other disciplines has laid the groundwork for a conceptual approach that moves beyond the urban–suburban binary and makes themes of suburban diversity central, and not merely exceptional, to American metropolitan history during all time periods. More than two decades ago, the editors of Postsuburban California (1991) questioned Orange County’s “national image as a bastion of conservatism” in favor of exploring “the richness and diversity of such a large and complex area,” including its racial, ethnic, and class heterogeneity and its decentralized yet multicentered built environment. ³¹ New work in political history has challenged the scholarly tendency to conflate postwar suburbanization with the New Right ascendancy by investigating grassroots liberalism from metropolitan Boston to suburban Los Angeles to the high-tech edge cities of the Sunbelt. ³² Innovative research in women’s history and gender studies has undermined one of the primary pillars of the postwar middle-class family ideal, the “feminine mystique” construct that Joanne Meyerowitz labels a “persistent stereotype of domestic, quiescent, suburban womanhood.” ³³ Sociologists in particular have conducted pathbreaking ethnographic studies of middle-class African American community formation, from residential neighborhoods inside city limits to majority-minority suburban counties. ³⁴ And an outpouring of work by social scientists, ethnic studies scholars, and historians has firmly supplanted the biracial model advanced by previous generations of urban/suburban scholars, especially in charting the experiences of Latinos, Asian Americans, and recent immigrants. ³⁵ While the interdisciplinary literature on “new immigrant gateways” and undocumented low-wage workers in present-day suburbs is vital, it is equally crucial to recognize that Mexican Americans and Asian Americans have been living on the metropolitan fringe for a long time, and that these and other ethnic groups also participated in the postwar suburbanization process in complex and still understudied ways. ³⁶

The contributors to this interdisciplinary forum do not seek to resolve the debate over suburban diversity in postwar America, but their case studies adopt the model of suburban heterogeneity as the starting point and advance the argument in important ways. Leading off, Michan Connor’s essay takes an atypical approach to an archetypal postwar suburb, the master-planned community of Lakewood, California. In 1954, Lakewood residents voted to incorporate as a “contract city” that guaranteed local autonomy over planning and zoning power while keeping property taxes low by externalizing much of the cost of public services to Los Angeles County. This so-called Lakewood Plan inspired a wave of similar suburban incorporations across and beyond Southern California, which is part of the well-known story of postwar metropolitan fragmentation through autonomous municipal policies that enabled tax hoarding while enforcing racial and class segregation. ³⁷ But Connor emphasizes the ways in which the Lakewood Plan’s ideological validation of “home rule” appealed to a diverse range of new suburban cities that included “blue-collar suburbs, wealthy residential enclaves, and single-purpose cities incorporated to shelter valuable industrial property from taxation.” The article’s most original insight traces how public choice theorists harnessed the symbolic meanings of the Lakewood Plan to redescribe the inequitable political process of municipal boundary drawing as a “natural” and efficient free-market phenomenon driven by residential consumer choice. In the early 1970s, the state government codified the public choice theory of metropolitan governance, which brought Southern California’s diversifying and urbanizing suburbs under the “common ideological and institutional frameworks of public choice [and] local control.” Through a metropolitan model of intra-suburban conflict, Connor shows how the logics of the Lakewood Plan created political alliances between Los Angeles and older suburban cities such as Pasadena and Long Beach, while informing (unsuccessful) “home rule” campaigns by African Americans in the annexed L.A. suburb of Watts and Latinos in unincorporated East Los Angeles.

In “Family Ideals,” Sarah Potter offers a second perspective on the urban–suburban relationship by questioning conventional narratives about “white flight” and the middle-class suburban ideal during the postwar decades. Her research draws from an extraordinary and previously untapped archive of case records of prospective adoptive and foster parents in the Chicago area, enabling a comparative analysis of middle-class black and white applicants, and of city and suburban residents. Potter demonstrates the complexity of residential choice during the baby-boom era, finding that “the urban-suburban binary favored by scholars does not capture the ideological attachments to place as closely as does a neighborhood-level analysis.” Rather than a consensus that suburbia provided the best family-friendly environment, these postwar couples chose both urban and suburban neighborhoods based on common factors such as the availability of desirable housing stock, proximity to relatives and friendship networks, recreational opportunities, and a widespread desire for communities with a “small-town” feeling. Potter’s findings reinforce the argument of postwar sociologists that at the neighborhood level, social class was a more important variable than “clear-cut hierarchies between urban and suburban space.” Middle-class white and black couples displayed similar attitudes toward residential space, although the latter’s experiences with discrimination placed an even higher premium on homeownership, often including a preference for income-generating multifamily dwellings. And rather than the common tactic of labeling lower-density residential neighborhoods inside the city as “suburban-style,” Potter shows the multiple meanings of areas such as Englewood on the South Side of Chicago, which could simultaneously feel both “small town” and “urban” to a white couple, and represent an upwardly mobile “suburban” destination for African American newcomers.

Moving from the metropolitan to the local perspective, Farrah Gafford also utilizes an extensive base of oral interviews in her study of middle-class black community formation in Pontchartrain Park, a planned development that opened in 1955 in New Orleans. The urban–suburban binary cannot capture the complicated location of Pontchartrain Park on the residential spectrum: an officially segregated space on the urban outskirts but inside the city limits; a neighborhood design that aspired to the familiar middle-class suburban ideal; an intimate community that felt like a “real village” to many of its early residents. Building on the research of Andrew Wiese and others, Gafford pays close attention to the mutually constitutive categories of race and class as the African American population of Pontchartrain Park “formed and maintained communal bonds” in the face of hostility from nearby white neighborhoods, with their community providing a physical refuge and a sociocultural sense of racial solidarity in a segregated society. While the mix of blue-collar and white-collar families that first moved to Pontchartrain Park collectively lacked the financial resources of white middle-class counterparts, community building strategies around schools and churches helped pave the way for upward class mobility for many children who grew up there and eventually became college-educated professionals in the “new black middle class.” Gafford’s interviews provide a rich account of the experiences of these youth, showing how the postwar suburban ideal took on particular racial and class inflections in Pontchartrain Park, and explaining why many second-generation residents continued to feel a commitment to the neighborhood as an African American space, even after they moved away. Like many postwar developments, Pontchartrain Park has undergone socioeconomic transition in recent years, with the greatest source of friction revolving around an influx of low-income residents, but in symbolic and physical terms the neighborhood remains an enduring link between the old and new black middle classes in New Orleans.

Wendy Cheng also challenges the hegemony of the postwar suburban ideal and advances the multiracial model of metropolitan history in her case study of the movement of Asian Americans and Mexican Americans into the communities of the West San Gabriel Valley in metropolitan Los Angeles. While investigations of suburban diversity in this region have focused prominently on the transformation of Monterey Park into a “suburban Chinatown” in the 1980s and the emergence of present-day “ethnoburbs,” Cheng’s story begins in the 1950s as Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese American families began breaking the color lines in white middle-income developments. Based on extensive oral interviews with these early migrants and their children, she concludes that Asian American and Latino suburbanites “developed a moral geography that was indelibly shaped by common experiences of discrimination and differential racialization in the housing market.” Through the key concept of differential racialization, which draws on new theoretical work in American Studies and comparative ethnic studies, ³⁸ Cheng shows how these ethnic minorities navigated the spatial and symbolic boundaries of white privilege while negotiating the categories of “model minority” (Asian Americans) and “ambiguously white” (Latinos). Cheng’s most provocative argument is that the struggle for equal access to homeownership became a “site of multiracial coalition building” as many Latino and Asian American homeowners adopted an explicitly antiracist ethos of property values and spatial identity, in contrast to the exclusionary ideologies of most white suburbanites. Although informed by middle-class norms, the residential ideals and political ideologies of Asian Americans and Latinos in the West San Gabriel Valley have coalesced around what Cheng calls a distinctive “multiethnic, multiracial nonwhite identity” that has redefined the meanings of suburban community in the majority-minority metropolis of Los Angeles.

Taken together, the essays in this forum strengthen the case for a metropolitan model that critically assesses the trope of urban–suburban divergence in modern America, pays close attention to multiple dimensions of heterogeneity within cities and suburbs alike, and reconsiders the perceived hegemony of the middle-class suburban ideal during the postwar decades. Instead of simply showing that suburban diversity existed by adding a more demographically diverse cast of characters to the familiar story, these case studies reveal that a broad range of metropolitan actors ascribed a variety of meanings to their homes and neighborhoods, to the reasons behind their migration to new communities, and to the networks and institutions at the center of their daily lives. At the individual and neighborhood levels, identity formation and community formation reflected racial, political, and economic logics that are not adequately represented by customary frameworks such as white flight, the city-suburb divide, the fragmented and segregated metropolis, and the middle-class ideal. The difficult challenge for “new suburban historians” is to balance the equally critical themes of suburban diversity and metropolitan inequality in our scholarship, without reproducing the culturally, politically, and racially constructed boundaries of the urban–suburban binary. The solution is not simply to excavate a greater degree of suburban diversity based on census categories alone, which is just as arbitrary as restricting the definition of suburbia to affluent white bedroom communities beyond the city limits, or expanding it to include low-density single-family neighborhoods wherever they are located. Rather than defend the boundaries of a new subfield, the literature on suburban diversity should become part of an integrated approach to metropolitan studies that consciously criss-crosses the deeply political, often artificial, and yet certainly consequential dividing lines between, among, and within cities and suburbs.